How is the focus of an utterance marked with prosody?
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The focus of an utterance is marked with prosody through various phonetic cues such as pitch accent, duration, intensity, voice quality, and spectral tilt. Different focus types like broad, narrow, and contrastive focus are distinguished by accentuation and acoustic features like fundamental frequency, tongue positions, and lip openings. In languages like Xitsonga and English, focus is realized through penultimate lengthening and alignment of pitch accent with lexical stress, respectively. Additionally, gestures can also play a role in marking focus, as seen in the entrainment function of head gestures in prosodic focus marking among L1 and L2 learners. The acoustic features and articulatory signals of a target syllable contribute significantly to the phonetic realization of focus in utterances.
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| Papers (5) | Insight |
|---|---|
| Focus in an utterance is marked with prosody through F0 movement, with topic indicated by an even tone on the stressed syllable and rhema by a significant pitch increase within a stressed syllable. | |
| Head gestures may precede prosodic focus marking in L2 learners, showing longer word duration in contrastive and corrective conditions, but no impact on pitch range or gesture presence based on the study. | |
| The focus of an utterance is marked with prosody through the alignment of pitch accent with lexical stress, influencing pitch peak height, energy mass, and pitch movements in speech production. | |
| Prosodic focus marking involves accentuation (unaccented vs. accented) and variations in fundamental frequency, intensity, voice quality, and spectral tilt, with accentuation showing the strongest effects. | |
| In Xitsonga, focus in an utterance is marked with penultimate lengthening, where focused elements exhibit longer penultimate syllables, indicating a focus-marked phonological phrase within the prosody. |
Related Questions
How do prosodic characteristics vary across different types of interrogative sentences (e.g., yes/no, wh-questions)?5 answersProsodic characteristics vary across different types of interrogative sentences. For instance, in Estonian, non-canonical questions exhibit lower mean pitch, longer duration, and non-modal voice quality compared to canonical questions. In Mandarin, mock polite speech features higher F0 and intensity, wider range, and higher variability, while mock impolite speech shows lower F0 and intensity, narrower range, and slower speech rate. Rhetorical questions in inquisitive semantics are marked by specific discourse effects and prosodic features in Mandarin, regardless of whether they suggest an empty or non-empty answer set. Furthermore, rhetorical questions in various languages, including German and English, differ from information-seeking questions in terms of f0-features, duration, and speaking rate, often characterized by non-modal voice quality.
How is the focus of an utterance related to acoustic and structural prominence?5 answersThe focus of an utterance is closely related to acoustic and structural prominence. Research across languages like English, German, and Mandarin shows that prosodic prominence, marked by variations in duration, intensity, pitch, and accentuation, plays a crucial role in signaling focus within an utterance. Specifically, prosodic cues interact with other linguistic features like clefting to guide listeners towards important information in discourse comprehension. Studies indicate that focused words and their alternatives are more salient when produced with contrastive prosodic prominence, activating them in both immediate and long-term processing. Furthermore, the perception of prominence is influenced by language-specific interpretations of pragmatic and phonological context, impacting the processing of contrastive structures within an utterance.
What is the difference between prosody and semantic groove?5 answersProsody refers to the melodic and rhythmic variation of speech, including aspects such as stress, accentuation, and speech melody. It plays a critical role in language development, aiding in early word segmentation and word learning. Prosody is also important in communication, conveying information about syntactic structure, semantic and pragmatic meaning, dialect, and affective states. On the other hand, semantic prosody is the associative meaning resulting from the collocates of a word. It is a subtle valenced meaning derived from co-occurrence in language and can affect evaluative inferences about related ambiguous concepts. While prosody focuses on the acoustic and rhythmic aspects of speech, semantic prosody deals with the meaning and connotations associated with words used in specific contexts.
What are discourse markers?5 answersDiscourse markers are words or phrases that indicate the structure of discourse by signaling the beginning of a new topic or connecting sentences, clauses, and paragraphs. They lack semantic content but play a role in discourse coherence and participants' attitudes. Scholars have studied discourse markers from various theoretical frameworks and have identified their linguistic properties, such as being short and reduced phonologically, sentence initial syntactically, and lacking propositional meaning semantically. Discourse markers have been attributed with multiple functions, including discourse connectors, turn takers, confirmation seekers, and attitude markers. They are prevalent in speech, more commonly used by women, and can serve as conversational monitoring devices. Some researchers propose that discourse markers should be considered a well-defined pragmatic category within the grammar of a language. Political discourse also utilizes discourse markers to influence the audience.
How is focus marked in different languages?5 answersFocus marking varies across languages and is influenced by factors such as syntax, prosody, and discourse style. In Romance languages, focus is associated with the nuclear pitch accent and can be shifted from its default position depending on the syntactic position of the focus. Subject inversion is characteristic of focus structures that cover the whole sentence or a single constituent. Presentational constructions are used to mark broad focus and avoid ambiguity. In Spanish, word order and intonation are used to mark focus to different degrees depending on the language variety, focused constituent, and focus type. In Tsimshianic and Chadic languages, verum focus is not realized in the same way as ordinary alternative focus, suggesting a distinction between the two. The choice of focus markers in Spanish is conditioned by different factors in different locales and discourse styles.
What are some related studies about semantic prosody in political discourse?5 answersSemantic prosody in political discourse has been the focus of several related studies. Sayaheen and Malkawi compiled a corpus of King Abdullah II's speeches in Arabic and English to analyze the collocations associated with selected nouns, revealing variations in collocations and noun occurrence, suggesting different ideologies. Kawai examined the role of intonation in manipulating audiences in River Plate Spanish political discourse, showing how rising intonation can be used to make information more accessible and divert attention from critical information. Silva Moura investigated the prosodic parameters of irony in political debates, finding that adjustments in F0 behaviors and duration act as clues for recognizing irony. Hu, Chen, Quené, and Sanders explored the impact of prosody, specifically the prosody of the causal connective "so" in English, on listeners' interpretation of causality, finding that prosodic features influenced listeners' choices of subjective or objective continuations. Alexiyevets studied the prosodic variations of viewpoint in English political discourse, focusing on auditory analysis of presentations delivered by politicians.